Sunday, August 26, 2012

We Americans Sometimes Slow To Learn A Lesson

(From today's Times and News-Star)

Why
is it we all know who shot presidents Lincoln and Kennedy and even who shot
Martin Luther King, but nobody much knows who shot presidents James Garfield
and William McKinley, which seems an especially heartless break for both
Garfield and McKinley, on both sides of the coin.

Probably
more people today recognize the names John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and
James Earl Ray than the names Garfield and McKinley. (What is the deal with
assassins with three names?)

Even
fewer would know WHEN Garfield and McKinley were presidents, and the only
reason I do is because I just read a 2011 bestselling book about Garfield, “Destiny
of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President,” by
Candice Millard.

A
former editor and writer at “National Geographic” magazine, Millard does not
write in a sensory way but does write with extreme clarity and organization,
something the less learned such as myself will be grateful for if reading this
remarkable and most noteworthy history lesson that, like Hillenbrand’s
“Seabiscuit” or Ambrose’s “Band of Brothers,” might have been mostly lost to
history had she not taken the time to unearth it and spotlight it for our
generation.

Garfield
was top shelf. The last of our presidents born in a log cabin, he was dirt
poor, his dad died when he was 2, he was the janitor at the school he attended
and was teaching classes before his first year was completed. Later he was the
school’s president.

That’s
working your way up from the bottom.

The
presidency was sort of thrown at him, and he accepted the nomination even
though he didn’t run for it or want it. He was not as politically savvy as many
others in Congress, yet he was wiser, more jolly and smarter than most of those
he served with.

A
nut named Charles Guiteau shot him in the back at a train station; Garfield
died four months later. Here’s where things get extra weird.

Had
the doctors left him alone, Garfield would have likely healed. But in their
misguided and egotistical attempts to find the bullet, they introduced
infections that would kill him. Given the chance, telephone inventor Alexander
Graham Bell would have likely found the bullet with one of his new inventions;
Bell was stymied by the ego of others.

A
couple of things changed after Garfield’s death in 1881. For one, shaken by the
random act of a madman, the country was united for the first time since the War
Between the States. And two, governmental appointments were thereafter earned
on the basis of merit and not handed out as political favors; the delusional Guiteau
shot the president in part because he wasn’t given a government job.

However,
Secret Service agents wouldn’t be assigned to guard the president until 20
years later, after McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz. Until then, the author
points out, “the idea of surrounding (a president) with guards…still seemed too
imperial, too un-American.”

That
Garfield was shot, a national experience of shared horror and senselessness, is
the shame of it all. He seems the kind of man you would want to hitch your
country’s wagon to, then or now. A family man, wise and noble who, as a
reporter of the time observed, “walked at evening with his arm around the neck
of a friend in affectionate conversation, and whose sweet, sunny, loving nature
not even 20 years of political strife could warp.”